In jazz, musicians utilize their mutual understanding of rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic principles as a springboard to new musical territories. Often referencing a popular song or blues tune, jazz improvisations engage in a continuous reshaping of known material that testifies to individual and collective intentiveness.
Susan Leigh Foster (2002)
In my freestyle practice I use a similar approach. The traditional movement repertoire - the basics - represent the tune, the line that you’re balancing on, walk on, sometimes leave but that you always have in mind. These basics create a common ground, a space in between, that you discuss with other dancers and that you share in a freestyle session. Freestyle is in that sense similar to improvisation with the difference that a distinct movement vocabulary is used.
The fundamental principle of freestyle is to combine prechoreographed movement material - the basics - in a spontaneously chosen order to music. The choice what to do next is made as you go.
Sheets-Johnstone (2009) describes the process of improvising, which applies to freestyling equally, as follows: At the same time that I’m moving, I am taking into account the world as it exists for me here and now in this ongoing, ever-expanding present.
Decisions on what to link come with the flow of the body and happen intuitively. Movements are most likely to be connected by following the momentum of the movement and by reacting to the music.
Through constant practice a virtuosity is attained that can span over different aspects of performance, musicality, quality of the movement, dynamics, articulation…
My fascination for this way of freestyling is to be able to find as many combinations between different movement sequences as possible — to be and to feel as free as possible in combining them.
I left the common path
While I’m looking for my own
I tackled numerous obstacles
— The way wasn’t paved.
I still see the common other path.
I observe it attentive.
Sometimes I’m drawn towards it
But somehow I can’t go back.
My own way has brought me too far away.
I walked the common path for long
And I got to know it well.
Memories of it live within me.
Those memories
transform, shape my present, get lost.
Now on my own path
I make new memories.
Slowly paving my way
By walking it many times.
I read back my traces
And share my favourite places.
Collection of Codes in Breaking:
- Done in cipher, cipher battle or stage battle
- Taking turns — call and response
- 30 to 45 sec solos
- Certain genre and speed of music
- Dramaturgy of the solo: start on top, go down, footwork/powermove/trick/freeze, finish
- Play with musicality by dancing to different layers of the music.
- Using Breaking vocabulary — the basics
- Present it to an audience; direct everything to the audience
- Build your material around a trick that is coming
- showcase virtuosity
A considerable part of my research went into finding out more about freestyling, about how it gives me a feeling of freedom and how the codes of Breaking frame this practice.
This space collects material around a solo I freestyled and shares some of the thoughts and processes that shaped its coming into being.
Freestyling in alternation and coexistance with the creative playground shape my approach to generating movement material.
Go through the material to check it out!